Sunday, July 16, 2017

The Kitch Lit Series: Reading Ruth

My first introduction to Ruth Reichl was through her fiction. Best known as the former restaurant critic for The New York Times, Delicious! was her first foray into fiction and I can only hope she returns. Delicious! tells the story of Billie Breslin, a young woman with an innate culinary acumen, who moves to New York to work for a food magazine. When the magazine is shut down she stays on to answer the magazine’s infamous reader hotline and, while leafing through archives in the empty office, discovers past correspondence between a young girl, Lulu, and famous chef James Beard. While uncovering Lulu’s story Billie begins to come to terms with her own. Bille’s weekend job at a local Italian food shop is a delicious (pun intended) subplot.

After Delicious! I was hungry for more and decided to sample her memoirs. What a splendid decision that turned out to be. Reichl’s Tender at the Bone has been on the list of great culinary reads since it was published and both it and its’ follow up Comfort Me With Apples are wonderful journeys through her life told with an eye to the food she avoided, loved and cooked. Reichl has lead a life filled with varied experiences and from boarding school in Montreal to a kitchen collective in Berkley to the finest restaurants in Los Angeles and New York, dining, cooking, appreciating and enjoying food remained a constant. Whether tasting a dish for the first time or cooking her dad’s favorite meal Reichl appeals to the reader’s conflicting want for discovery and familiarity in food and in life.

Of course, no matter how interesting the life or how appealing the food these books would be laborious if poorly written. Luckily, Reichl was born to write. She has a gift for readability, a talent I love in a writer. I so appreciate writers that structure sentences, paragraphs and chapters in a way that flow so easily that the pages practically turn themselves. Her descriptions are never forced or overcomplicated and her characters jump off the page. Like a perfect meal, Reichl crafts beautiful books from soup to nuts.

If you love to eat, cook, read or write and have not yet read Ruth Reichl now is the time to start.